Thursday, January 26, 2017

Quiet stretch for now - when does the next storm arrive?

We made it to Thursday and heading into the weekend, the weather looks rather uneventful. It's looking like a typical stretch of January weather with sunshine and highs in the 40s. The wind isn't very pleasant, especially with temperatures down in the teens and 20s early in the day.

I don't expect any rain or snow chances around here any time soon. We will likely go another 8 or 9 days before we see the next system approaching Kansas. The timing and details are unknown this far out, but forecast models are hinting at something developing and moving our way toward the first weekend in February. Stay tuned.

Couple of other notes to point out. The Arctic Oscillation is going back negative, which is a strong indicator of much colder air slipping back south and into the US. What we are experiencing now is likely the "mild" before we get hit again with bitter cold. You can see one of the forecast products we look at has a BIG chunk of cold air slipping south in the first 7-8 days of February. It could turn out to be a pretty chilly month.

It's been exciting to see our first pictures coming from the new weather satellite that was launched into space last November. There's still some work to be done to get it all setup, but the end result will be higher quality satellite images, more lightning data, and faster update times. In time, this will mean better forecast data for us to look at, especially when dealing with severe thunderstorms. Many of the satellite images available to us today update every 15-20 minutes. Once the new satellite becomes fully operational, we will be getting some images every 30 seconds. Here are some of the images that came out earlier this week. Notice the big cloud mass over the US? That was the ice storm that hit almost 2 weeks ago. Click on the images to make them larger. Have a great day!